


never and always touching and touched

by Wildehack (Tyleet)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-28
Updated: 2016-01-28
Packaged: 2018-05-16 18:44:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5836591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>”What’s it like? Being in someone else’s mind?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	never and always touching and touched

It starts off innocently enough:   
  
Finn’s curled up with Rey in the Falcon’s cockpit, sailing through hyperspace. It should take about six more hours to reach Tattoine, and there’s nothing much to do while they wait but talk. Rey’s feet are up on his chair, and he’s resting one of his hands on her ankles, and she keeps smiling at him for no reason. It’s pretty great.  
  
Poe’s cleaning his blasters in the crew lounge, which is a fairly transparent excuse to give Finn and Rey some time alone. Finn might have objected if he hadn’t been so involved in Rey’s story about the Targarian pirates and the bacta tank. Chewie left to take a nap, muttering about how they’ll learn to take their rest when they can get it, if they live long enough.  
  
Finn thinks he’d take talking with Rey over sleep even if he’d been awake for a week. As it is, they’ve only been reunited for three days, and she seems to feel the same, telling him all about Luke Skywalker and her training, words spilling out of her if she is as urgent as Finn to share everything they've missed, to make it like she never left.   
  
So when she talks about Luke Skywalker (Luke _Skywalker_ ) showing her how to order her thoughts, he has to ask–-”What’s it like? Being in someone else’s mind?” 

Rey frowns, considering. “With Master Luke, it’s like–-a house. An old sandstone house, full of doors that slide open and shut when he wants them to. I don’t know how else to describe it. And then I move through the house, only I can’t direct it, I’m drifting on this sort of-–wind.”   
  
“A wind,” Finn repeats, skeptical. “There’s a wind in Luke Skywalker’s brain?”   
  
“Well, it _feels_ like a wind,” Rey says, a little crossly. “Or a current. It would be really hard to go anywhere else in the house, because the wind wants you to drift with it. It’s sort of sunny and gold, too-–like sand lifted by a windstorm.”   
  
“Is that what everyone’s mind is like?” he asks, absently rubbing at her ankle with the pad of his thumb. “Houses and winds?”   
  
“No,” she says, her eyes going strange and distant for a second. “Kylo Ren’s mind isn’t like that at all.”   
  
Finn sits up straighter, tension stealing into his spine, broken, now mended. “Hey,” he says, and lets his hand fall away. “You don’t have to talk about that, if you don’t want.”   
  
"No, it’s okay,” she says, refocusing on him. She sits up straight herself, bringing her feet down off the edge of his chair. “It was just different, because he wanted something from me. I think Master Luke’s mind was a place on _purpose_ , because he wanted to show me things, and that was the easiest way. Kylo Ren’s mind was more of an-–” she bites her lower lip, scowling a little. “An _experience_. Like shoving your arm into a well and feeling around for the eel.”   
  
He can’t help shuddering. “ _That_ I can picture,” he says grimly, and Rey makes a face.   
  
“Sorry,” she says, and nudges his knee with hers. “You must not love talking about him, either.”   
  
Finn shrugs. He’s made his choice; fighting with the Resistance means facing Kylo Ren again, one day. Knowing his brain is like cold water and teeth doesn’t make that any worse. “It’s fine,” he says. “Seriously. Hey, what’s _your_ brain like?”   
  
Rey blinks. “I–-I’m not sure,” she admits, and then gives him a slightly embarrassed smile. “I guess it’s hard to tell from inside it?”   
  
Finn smiles back. “I bet it’s a castle,” he teases her. “With turrets, and silk flags, and a statue of you twenty feet high, and a band inside playing your favorite song-–”  
  
She smacks his leg, and forgets to take her hand off his thigh. “My brain is not _a cantina_ ,” she says, but she’s grinning. He grins back, and for no reason that he can tell, she looks down at her hand and turns pink. “I could, um. I could show you,” she says, with deceptive casualness. “If you wanted.”   
  
For a second, he doesn’t understand, and then it hits him with a shivery rush of curiosity. “You–-you can do that?” he asks, and his voice comes out horrifically breathless. “Show me your mind? Like, your thoughts, and your feelings, and–-well, not _all_ your thoughts and feelings, just, whatever you want me to see, obviously. If I could even see it-–I’m not a Jedi, and, uh. You can _do_ that?” He has to bite his tongue to get himself to stop. He’s always had a tendency to talk too much under pressure.   
  
But she’s smiling at him again, small and fond. “I can do that,” she says, and she sounds a little breathless herself.   
  
“Okay,” he says. “Yeah. That’d be, that’d be interesting. Definitely. Yes.”   
  
“Do you want to do it now?” she asks, and something about her expression reminds him of the banked excitement on her face when he first told her he was with the Resistance. Like it’s an adventure she badly wants to go on, but she’s trying to stay realistic.   
  
“Yeah,” he says, because he’d rather die than than say no to that look. “Yeah, let’s do this.”   
  
“Brilliant,” she says with a huge smile. She reaches out carefully and puts her hands on his knees, just lightly touching.   
  
“Don’t you need to do the-–” he gestures with an outstretched hand, the way he’s seen Kylo Ren reach into a prisoner’s head before.   
  
“Oh, no, physical contact is easier,” Rey assures him. “Close your eyes, okay? Just breathe in and out, for a minute. I’m going to pull you in-–if you want to stop, just say, and I’ll let go. All right?”   
  
Finn has already closed his eyes. “All right,” he says.   
  
For a minute he feels nothing, just the sounds of their breath and the warmth of her fingers on his knees. Then he feels a light tug, and the strangest floating feeling-–the closest thing he’s experienced is the disconnect he sometimes feels when he’s been awake too long. He’s still aware of his body, but he feels separate from it, somehow, and he’s being drawn away. He sees now why Rey called it a wind-–he can feel her presence flowing past him, ahead somewhere. He lets her take him, drifts with her current.   
  
Rey’s mind isn’t a house, or a well. Rey’s mind is an _ocean_. There’s blue stretching out as far as he can see, shifting patterns of grey and blue and green and sudden sparkles of gold from the reflected suns, pearls of foam dancing on the water, rough waves that seem both dangerous and playful, the wondrous and terrifying feeling that there are things under the surface he can’t see.   
  
“I see it,” he says, and very distantly he knows his voice sounds choked with emotion. “I see it, Rey.” But he more than sees it, he feels it, all at once a lonely expanse and waiting for a storm and childlike delight because he hasn’t seen it all yet, _the island, finn, you have to see the island_.   
  
“Show me,” he whispers, and he can’t see her but he can feel her take his hand, tugging him forward.   
  
The island is beautiful, dark rock and green everywhere, but more than that is the feeling he has looking at it: like home, like trust, like family is waiting, somewhere at the top. It fits into his chest like an extra heartbeat, soothing wounds he didn’t remember existed-–the hollows where family and home should be.  
  
_You’re crying_ , Rey says with concern, only she doesn’t say it. He feels her distress, though, her shame that she’s upset him, and a pressure like her thumb swiping across his cheek.    
  
“No, it’s not that,” Finn says, and there aren’t words to explain. Instead he–-opens himself up. There’s no better way to explain it, but it feels like unlocking a door, like taking a slow breath in and letting it out.   
  
Rey touches the open door with a delicate sense of uncertainty. “Yes,” Finn whispers, he’s sure, yes.   
  
Rey slips into his mind and it’s like nothing else he’s ever felt, utterly strange and aching and good. He’s still standing on the shore of her island, shale stairs stretching up into the sky, foam licking his feet, but he knows in some undefinable way that Rey is deep inside him, that she’s found something that’s filled her with a fierce protectiveness, that she’s found something else that fills her with awe. He starts climbing the stairs, gasping with the vulnerability of it, the unreal shivering closeness. He tries to step lightly on the rock.   
  
_Finn_ , she says with a trembling tenderness, and as easy as that he knows she loves him.   
  
_Me too_ , he thinks with an honesty that would be embarrassing under any other circumstances. _Me too, Rey_.   
  
When he gets to the top of the stairs, panting hard, she’s there, looking lost. The urgent sense of _family_ and _home_ is still there. _It’s you_ , he thinks, or maybe she thinks, and he collapses into her, her arms tight around him and his face in her neck.  _It’s you, now_.   
  
Eventually Rey disentangles them, and Finn sinks back into his body. It would almost feel lonely, except that he can still feel her. He’s covered in sweat, his heart racing, his fingers white-knuckled on the arms of his chair. Rey’s in a similar state, staring at him with open-mouthed shock. Her hands are still on his knees.   
  
His mouth is so dry that he has to swallow twice, before he can speak. “That ever happen before?” he asks, and it comes out creaking and strange.   
  
She shakes her head, wide-eyed and silent.   
  
With an effort he unclenches his hands from the chair. “I can still _feel_ you,” he says, stupidly. He has a new awareness of her in the back of his mind, a little golden thread winding from him to her.   
  
She licks her lips, and Finn groans. “I think,” she says, dazed, her eyes falling down to his mouth, “I think I bonded us. On accident.”   
  
“What’s that mean,” he whispers. His hands slip down to hers entirely of their own accord, and he’s pulling her forward, pulling her close, so she’s half-kneeling over him. It doesn’t feel right, not being close to Rey.   
  
“I–-can we figure that out later?” she asks, her eyes blown black, and the words fall right against his lips.   
  
“Yeah,” Finn agrees, with a helpless rush of love. “Yeah, okay.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, I don't know where this came from. IT JUST HAPPENED. 
> 
> As always, feedback is adored, and I'm wildehack at tumblr if you wanna come talk to me about Rey or Finn or mindfucking.


End file.
